Oh God It's Happening Again: Clemson vs Ohio State
The Weird Cursed History of Clemson beating Ohio State
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The College Football Playoff is going to suck. I just wanted to let you know that now before you spend time getting worked up about who is going to win what, what it means for recruiting, or state pride, or bragging rights, or whatever other things that people choose to argue about.
Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, and Notre Dame are going to meet up in a sanctimonious collection of blue blood programs. They will talk about all the challenges they overcame (they mean ignored) this season due to Covid, and act like they are the rightful four teams rising to the top in something resembling a fair and legitimate process. Then, either Alabama or Clemson will be declared the champion.
You don’t have to watch it.
Unfortunately, I do. The team I root for has been invited to play Clemson yet again. This is the one program in the country I never, ever, want my Ohio State Football Buckeyes to play for any reason. This year poses a slightly more complex set of reasons than in years past. But the simple explanation is that this game shouldn’t happen because terrible things happen to Ohio State when they play Clemson.
This matchup has only happened four times in the schools’ mutual century-and-change of playing something resembling modern football. Across those four games, Ohio State has 1.) lost a legendary coach, 2.) lost a star quarterback, 3.) been stomped into the dust in the least competitive game between “peers” I’ve ever watched, and 4.) heartbreakingly lost a game they arguably “should” have won.
That’s essentially every different kind of bad outcome you can have as a sports team across a mere four games. Who knows what new horror game number five will reveal? Perhaps some sort of Gamera-like kaiju will step on the Ohio State sideline in the third quarter and crush the entire team under its feet.
If you have listened to our podcast or know me at all, you know that I’m about as analytically minded and process-oriented as a quasi-professional sports enthusiast can be. Despite this, I am still incapable of being objective about my team and firmly just believe there is just “bad juju” associated with this matchup for Ohio State.
Praying to Jobu hasn’t helped. I don’t know if we mistakenly knocked over Clemson’s stupid rock at some point or said one too many things about how orange and purple is not a valid or good color combination, but somehow a curse was created. On a related note, there are no tigers from South Carolina! Get a real mascot like an anthropomorphic poisonous nut.
If I had to guess, this curse probably has something to do with Ohio State’s patron saint Woody Hayes losing his damn mind—even more so than usual— and deciding to punch a Clemson player in the first-ever matchup between the schools.
I truly cannot overstate just how wildly dumb and bad a moment it was from Woody Hayes. This wasn’t even some sort of Pedro Martinez-Don Zimmer moment where an extremely ill-advised punch gets thrown in a team-wide fracas when emotions are high. Clemson nose guard Charlie Bauman made an interception and his return ends up on the Ohio State sideline. Woody Hayes then decides to punch a college kid in the helmet. He was rightfully fired for that but it would make a lot of sense if Ohio State is still repaying some sort of spiritual sports debt for one of the most ludicrous things I have ever seen a grown-ass man do.
Things didn’t get much better in this cursed matchup in Game 2. Braxton Miller was an absolute dominant college quarterback until he played one too many snaps against Clemson and ruined his shoulder so badly he never played QB again for the Buckeyes (though he did have one dope spin move). To be totally fair to any potential curse skeptics, Miller did not completely lose the ability to throw a football until spring practice when he exacerbated the labrum injury he sustained against Clemson. The circumstances of the final injury are pretty fishy though as an unnamed source told Sports Illustrated at the time, “‘He didn’t even get hit,’ the source said. ‘He threw and it’s just a freakish thing. Everyone is scratching their head on how it happened.’” Hard to play more into my curse narrative than that, thank you unnamed source from 5 years ago!
It should be noted that, because Ohio State is a very good program, they were able to find numerous good quarterbacks to fill Braxton Miller’s spot. So, it’s not like the injury was a program-defining moment. On the other hand, it meant Ohio State and the rest of the Big Ten got to watch JT Barrett dive up the middle 20 times a game for the next several years while winning a lot, but not as impressively as they probably should have. So, in a way, we all lost.
Game three…. I don’t think I need to explain to you why losing 31-0 is bad? But, if you were lucky enough not to watch it I assure you, it wasn’t that close and it took way longer than it should have. This was the first time that Ohio State had been shut out in a bowl game since 1921, which sure seems like a thing that happens due to a curse. It’s pretty brutal to lose so badly that the team’s marching band clowns you the following year. You can’t even be mad about it because yes, that absolutely happened.
Needless to say, even setting aside last year’s close competitive heartbreaker of a game during which I only injured two fingers, this is a matchup I would just rather avoid at all costs.
It’s not just Ohio State fans that don’t want this game to happen. Even Clemson’s coach doesn’t think Ohio State should be there! Dabo has his own reasons for denigrating the Buckeyes “season” but let’s not pretend that Ohio State has looked like some sort of juggernaut this year. They played one decent offense all year in Indiana and eked out a 7 point win after nearly blowing a four-score lead.
In order to secure the playoff bag, the Big Ten changed their arbitrary rules, created so they could look thoughtful and important, and allowed Ohio State to play in the storied ten-year-old tradition that is the Big Ten Championship game. Ohio State responded by promptly laying an egg for 3 quarters before deciding to remember they are much larger than Northwestern. Ohio State then plowed over them to the tune of 399 rushing yards and won by 12 whole points. When you convert that from Big Ten points into real points, it’s like 30 points though.
Clemson hasn’t exactly had a tremendous season either. If you are the kind of lunatic who would decide to bet on Syracuse to cover the spread against the Tigers (ie-my co-host Gabe), you were very happy earlier this year when Clemson decided to play with their food. They also committed the cardinal sin of college football and allowed Notre Dame fans to feel good. In all fairness, their best player Trevor Lawrence was out in that game but it’s hard to feel THAT bad about his absence given the team’s general attitudes about Covid this year.
Frankly, it’s hard to cut any team a break for not being able to field full healthy teams during a global pandemic because there’s no good reason that these football games should be played in this environment in the first place. This is not meant to be flippant about players contracting or dealing with the effects of Covid, which can be very serious even for young healthy people. It’s merely meant to highlight the ludicrous nature of intentionally choosing to undertake a risky activity and then crying foul when the natural and probable consequence of undertaking that activity rears its head. As I like to say every time I burn my hand pulling something out of the oven using a dishtowel instead of the slightly harder to reach oven mitts “AH! if it isn’t the direct consequences of my actions!”
I will end with a call to action! Do not watch this cursed matchup unless you really like watching Ohio State lose in new and innovative ways. If you happen to be some sort of paranormal investigator traveling around the country in a van solving mysteries, please let me know what we can do about this curse. I have thirteens of podcasting dollars and I will happily compensate you. If you do watch, I will be there too, eating pigs in a blanket and probably having one too many beers brewed in the state of Ohio while researching how to properly exorcise this matchup’s demons.